Regional Contexts of Sexual Harassment in the United States: A Comparison of the SEAC and SCA Surveys

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Presidential Session: What Is at Stake? The Impacts of Inequity and Harassment on the Practice of Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Sexual harassment has long been rampant in the discipline of archaeology, and until recently, our collective understanding of its pervasiveness and effects has been largely anecdotal. Recent surveys on the topic aimed at the memberships of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference (Meyers et al. 2018) and the Society for California Archaeology (Radde 2018; VanDerwarker et al. 2018) are beginning to provide the data necessary to understand the rates and contexts of harassment in American settings. Interestingly, while both surveys report high rates of harassment, the rate reported by SEAC members is nearly 20% greater than that reported in the SCA survey (68% vs. 50%). This large discrepancy, along with significant demographic differences between the two samples, reveals the need for a geographically broader survey implemented by the SAA to account for differential factors leading to this divergence. Our presentation explores this discrepancy with the goal of discovering which variable(s) associate with the lower vs. higher harassment rates in these two broad regions—an exercise which may allow us to pinpoint specific changes that could be implemented in different contexts to reduce this seriously problematic behavior.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Presidential Session: What Is at Stake? The Impacts of Inequity and Harassment on the Practice of Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32280